Monday, April 07, 2008

Cheating my alphabet a little bit for a combo of letters: CD. I probably own more CDs than I ever owned records, or "vinyl" as we call them now to distinguish them by material rather than purpose - a "back formation", linguistically speaking. We had plenty of 78s in the house when I was little. I remember when we got a Hi-Fi for the living room, and on that Hi-Fi we played comedy albums, Broadway show tune compilations, Bob Dylan, Bennie Goodman, the Turtles and so forth all the way up to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. You could stack the 45s on there, from the Chipmunks to Elvis, and a new one dropped down when one finished.

The first album I remember spending my allowance on was Creedance Clearwater Revival. I never thought there was much point to buying albums, because you could hear it all for free on the radio. But when I loved a song, I had to figure out the lyrics, jotting them down by the radio, or spring for the record and hope the lyrics were written inside the album cover.

When the market started shifting to CD format, I was really angry. I felt cheated that I was going to have to buy my favorites all over again. But by then, I had moved a lot and the albums were starting to get ragged. Some were warped and all were scratched. The ads assured us that CDs were PERMANENT and that we'd never have to replace them. Now I am trying to find the time to strip all the music off of my collection and get it all digitized. In the meantime, my CDs are in a box under the bed! Only the very favorites have been dropped into iTunes and get played in the kitchen off of my iPod.